In philosophy we have no right to throw out one erroneous answer
if that answer has quality (human experience), and since in philosophy
we are concerned with the idea itself (for example: philosophy is
concerned with the idea of God, religion with the existence of God)
and how it was possible for man to arrive at that idea or answer
at all, we have always to look and to inquire again. So in discussing
the situation we now find ourselves in and how it came about and
man's changed position in the world, we have to look back at how
man lived up to 1800 and have to ask: How was it possible and how
did it happen that man believed in God almost up to 1800 and then
suddenly stopped--replacing this dropped belief with a merely negative
belief that God did not exist.

This we will try to find out, but first lets start with this negative
belief--for a belief it is--that God does not exist. Since Kant
showed us that we cannot know whether God exists or not, it means
that the atheist cannot possibly know that God does not exist--so
he is really a believer in nothingness. This brings us immediately
to the question of faith and to the distinction between faith and
belief. Pure faith (which philosophy can accept as such) means that
you believe in God although you know that you cannot pretend to
know that He exists. Belief on the other hand implies that you pretend
to know that God exists (or, as in the case of the negative belief
of the atheist, that God does not exist). In faith you cross the
borderline from reason to faith, but so long as you never try to
convince anyone else of your faith, it can be a question of pure
faith, and as such something that philosophy (free philosophy) can
accept; the minute you try to convince anyone else of your faith,
it means that you have to try to argue philosophically and to pretend
to believe. The medieval mystic could still try to talk of his own
experiences because they were so strong and because he still lived
in an age of belief, but now the situation is such that a philosopher
like Karl Jaspers has said that if a mystic would come to him, he
would have to say: "I am sorry, but I cannot talk to you about
this. I am not in a state of grace."

The negative belief of the atheist brings up yet another point
with his "I believe that I do not believe.", we come into
the realm of the demoniacal. Old theologians always said that the
denial of God was done by the Devil, but this denial of the atheist
is not diabolical. It concerns an inner human experience which has
much to do with the principle of the demonic. Thinking in the West
(Heidegger, etc.), combining with the thoughts of psychology, has
lately found that there is such a thing as being possessed. Scientifically
explained, this means that a man is possessed by his own mental
processes which he cannot control--like the idee fixe, for example,
where the man is not thinking, but is "being thought."
Since Nietzsche a branch of psychology has developed in which an
analysis has been made of certain motives human beings use--especially
of inferiority and the development of the quality of resentment
as a negative form of action. Relating this to the atheist, we see
that while he claims not to have a mystical experience as the saint
does, actually he does. The atheist after being driven into a corner
will suddenly pop out with "But I believe that I do not believe
in God." A terrible inner action is taking place here: the
atheist has experienced his own inner nothingness; he denies God
compulsively because he feels himself to be nothing--and the relation
with the demonic is clearly there.

In philosophy we would then have to say that with this we have
an answer and would have to ask: What makes this reaction possible?
and why do most people who have had the inner experience of their
own nothingness react so wildly and so especially against God? They
react this way because if a man feels himself to be valueless and
is penetrated by that feeling (the personal nihilistic experience),
then the will to destruction of all values is the immediate reaction.
Destruction of all values means to aim at the thing always valued
most highly by man: God. It is not the Devil in action but man who
has been robbed of all feelings of his own personal quality; man
who has been driven into the feeling of no qualities of his own
whatsoever along with tremendous resentment against himself. But
we are very bad self-destroyers for human beings have also a quality
of grandeur--which Pascal put forward as one-half of man's basic
condition (the other being misery). The quality that makes for man's
grandeur is that he can love somebody else more than himself. This
is one of the peaks of the possible creativeness of man, but on
the other hand, man can never take anyone else more seriously than
himself. This is automatic because man lives with himself, even
in dreams, mirroring himself continuously, and he cannot possibly
spend the same energy on anyone else. If he is in a state of love,
loving someone more than himself, then he is safe. But this borderline
man we are talking about has paid for this nothingness with the
loss of the capacity to love. So he is only left with the other
quality--the inability to take anyone else more seriously than himself--and
he must deny the worth and value of everyone else.

These have all been preliminary probings into the question in order
to give you an idea of how philosophy proceeds, but before I go
on I must say that I have a funny feeling in starting this course.
I have always felt that I would never give such a course; in fact
I have always made it a condition in taking a job not to give an
introductory course in philosophy--for that is impossible, and the
man who does is either a fool or a teacher of a science (the history
of philosophy). An introductory course in philosophy is doing that
which philosophy teaches--teaching life (which is all that philosophy
can teach). Then the modern situation forced a thinker, Karl Jaspers,
to give a series of lectures on the "Way to Wisdom: An Introduction
to Philosophy." I had supposed that he would take the position
I have always taken, but then I saw why he could do it. Jaspers
is an existentialist who comes from psychology. His position is
that philosophy cannot be taught, but philosophizing can be taught.
Since he has a most definite answer to the question of what philosophy
is (philosophy is philosophizing) and because he is a very sceptical
man, he gives a very different introduction to philosophy. I want
you to have this book in order to check on me. This is always good;
it makes you feel independent. You will find that Jaspers says that
what philosophy is, nobody knows and that for as many philosophers
as there are, there are as many definitions. Jaspers feels that
the very definition a philosopher gives of what philosophy is shows
what he, the philosopher, is. It would seem by this that we would
be stuck with an infinity of philosophical systems--and we are.
Jaspers in his youth wrote an excellent history of philosophy and
made a comparative study of things that they had in common. He was
of the opinion that there had been no real development in philosophy
and that everyone had to make his own philosophy--some, of course,
were more gifted than others in this. This position is of a tremendous
educational value, but it also changes philosophy into pedagogy.

With a philosopher, and especially with a modern philosopher, we
must always ask: What is he fighting for? Of the modern philosophers,
Jaspers and Camus (with the exception of Heidegger, who is different
again) are the only ones who make a stand. They are really rebellious
humanists and what they are fighting for is a revival of metaphysical
humanism. They became aware that the humanism of the 19th Century
had an anti-humanistic element and led straight into the nihilistic
situation which led again to totalitarianism. They want to fight
totalitarianism and by the means of re-establishing certain values
of humanism so that we can make a kind of liberal restoration and
thereby get into a position where we have a leg to stand on in the
nihilistic situation. Metaphysically speaking, we are still lost,
and politically, even in democracy we do not have a counter-proposition
to totalitarianism. They believe that we have underrated liberalism
and that it can be restored. But what they both do is to fall back
on a proposition that only holds true for the individual. If we
consider the nihilistic situation to be a great flood, they are
building walls. But we cannot build walls against a flood; we must
build an ark--or to speak modernly, we must learn to fly; we must
overcome it. The masses are falling and are being driven into a
trap by social circumstances created by nihilism and we cannot stop
them by the mere means of educating the individual. Jaspers is a
great educator and can have the effect upon an individual of making
him really tough against the nihilistic situation, but it takes
years to acquire the necessary knowledge—which is a very suspicious
fact in itself: it means that he goes back to science. One should
not need that much knowledge; it is not really creative philosophical
work any more (though it is re-creative). And this is why I differ
from him--I think there is something more.

Philosophy also shows where human thinking now stands because every
philosophy designed means that man--the philosopher is not a man
alone, but representative--in a certain situation has tried to take
a new position in the world toward the world and toward himself.
A history of philosophy, as Hegel thought, cannot exist as a thing
in itself. There is no such continuity or unity, but there is a
much deeper unity: the unity of human experience within the world
in different situations which shows the basic identity of the will.
If we look at philosophy as attempts to regulate the position that
man takes in the world at a certain time and in a given situation,
then we can talk about a certain history of philosophy: an history
of the continuous widening of the range of the human mind and the
deeper and higher meanings of life that are gained. In that sense
it is worthwhile to teach the history of philosophy, but it is only
taught now in Hegel's or Jaspers' way.

But we are interested in the question: What is philosophy? Philosophy
cannot be taught. Why not? Because everybody is a philosopher; he
just does not know it. There are two kinds of professional human
beings who have to argue with every idiot in the world: philosophers
and politicians. Everyone feels he knows about politics and about
life--who should have a greater life experience than he - that little
idiot - and he is right. We are obliged to try to be creative in
those fields or we might lose our freedom. That is also the reason
why everyone should study philosophy. He is in it anyway and mostly
he has no idea of what a bad performer he is. Philosophy now means
only free philosophy. Philosophy has not existed yet on its own.
It has been driven into its own by the nihilistic situation and
science, and forced away from religion and the cosmos. In that most
dangerous situation in which we find ourselves philosophy for the
first time has to answer the question: What are you? Previously,
philosophy was mixed up with every trend of human life, but now
it has to account for itself and to show that it is something that
human beings need. We are forced to raise the question seriously
in our time: What is philosophy? We cannot answer with Jaspers'
reply that everyone has to make up his own mind what philosophy
is. We must find out what philosophy really is.

Philosophizing does not mean that we all think independent thoughts.
We all think thoughts of others and most people cannot get out of
this framework of thinking with the thoughts and prejudices of others.
We must develop philosophy by developing what creates philosophy:
the mind that thinks. A being grows by continuous exhaustion: in
love by continuous loving, in thinking by exhausting the mind. This
is a funny phenomenon and there is no natural explanation for it.
Here we have the first point to go on if we want to find out where
man has been entirely enslaved by pseudo-scientific ideologies.
All have one thing in common: they tell us that man is entirely
explainable out of his circumstances. If we know his circumstances,
we can know him more and more. He is a product of the world; a product
of things as they are. This would mean that the world including
man could be explained physically.

Now I call physical everything that comes into and goes out of
being without the help of man. I use it in the Greek sense of physis--the
thing that emerges--and add to that: without the help of man. I
call them occurrences because we do not know even if things exist.
A lot of phenomena come about without our will, including dreams.
Thus the physical is everything in being that does not come into
being or go out of being with our help. Metaphysical I call everything
(an event) that would not have happened if man would not have done
it. This is the sphere of man's freedom and creativeness. An event
we cause has metaphysical significance; but if the wind blows a
book on the floor, it is an occurrence. It happens in a definite
line of other occurrences (which we might be able to control by
scientific means but which we do not create); they are interrelated
chains of occurrences. No metaphysical implication whatsoever is
involved; no meaning whatsoever is involved--though consequence
and sense might be involved (we could follow the line of the wind
or measure the strength of the wind). By no meaning I mean that
everything in the realm of the physical has the implication of being
merely functional. It can be measured and grasped merely by functional
means. Anything that has meaning must have intention. In the case
of an idée fixe, for example, the patient's mental processes
have lost meaning; they are merely functional now.

Formerly when we believed in God and the cosmos we believed that
natural things had meaning because God put meaning into them, but
now we cannot believe in this. There are no spirits in the cosmos
that set their will against us; we have overcome them. There is
absolutely no meaning in the intentional sense in physical occurrences,
but if I throw a book on the floor, doing it intentionally, this
means it has meaning. This action I caused--intention causes an
action; an action causes an event--and now I can really talk of
cause and effect (and we all think now in terms of cause and effect).
It is also an occurrence because the strength by which I did that--throwing
the book on the floor--was coming into my body from an uninterrupted
chain of occurrences. I used this to bring about an event so both
occurrence and event are therefore involved. The metaphysical action
of the human will also manifests itself by butting into a chain
of given occurrences, putting it into the service of the human will
and bringing it into an event. Now the occurrence has meaning too;
intention has been put into the occurrence. What Heidegger calls
"the things in hand" is the exact togetherness of an occurrence
and an event. Intention has gotten hold of a chain of occurrences
and transposed it into another chain of occurrences that now has
meaning--which is what we used to call form. But this being that
can do that cannot be explained out of all the chains of occurrences
in the world--and here lies the first proof for human freedom.

Kant still thought that freedom could not be proved (along with
God and immortality) and one shortcoming of Kant was stopping there.
(He also had one wrong question: the question was not one of immortality
but eternity; immortality is only personal. We are only concerned
with immortality because we are concerned basically with eternity.)
The other shortcoming of Kant was that he believed those three things--freedom,
God, and immortality--must be believed in or the human mind would
not function in freedom. And since philosophy is concerned with
freedom, and has always been distinguished from religion by caring
for freedom first, God next, as religion cared always for God first
freedom second--or morally speaking, philosophers have always cared
for truth first, goodness second; religious thinkers for goodness
first, truth second--we must now raise again the question: What
is freedom? and can a human being be free? and how? This is the
pivotal question.

We believed up to 1800 that knowledge and understanding were the
same, that understanding was a higher kind of knowledge. Even now
we do not have the concept that knowledge and understanding are
entirely different, but we could believe in the identity of knowledge
and truth only so long as we believed in the identity of the physical
and the metaphysical as well. And only so long as we believed in
cosmical events and not in natural occurrences, could we believe
that they revealed meaning, that there was a guidance inherent in
what we call natural occurrences. That means we are no longer entitled
to say that understanding and knowledge are the same, that knowledge
makes for truth. This error had its source in Greek thinking--in
Platonic and Aristotelian thinking. If the idea of an object in
my mind coincided with the object itself, it used to be called truth;
now it is only adequate because truth must have meaning in it, and
it must be more than recognition. Jaspers has made a new theory
uniting again knowledge and understanding, saying that the scientist
is concerned with truth--which is true, but he is only concerned
with the pre-conditions of truth. Understanding is applicable only
to the metaphysical; knowledge to the physical. Understanding enables
us to communicate with other beings; knowledge is always one-sided
because knowledge only enables us to handle things--and things know
nothing of us (they only answer by changing, which is no answer)
and we can never know things in themselves (Kant was right). However,
when meaning, which is intentional, has been put into a thing, as
with human-produced things, then we can and we must listen to what
other human beings have put into a thing. Since this thing was built
for a purpose, it has the language of form and it speaks and has
intention.

Lecture II

I want to talk now about the difference of my approach and Jaspers'
on why and how do we study philosophy so that you can make the differentiations
as you read Jaspers' book, but first I want to change the title
of this course to: Why and How Must Every Man Study Philosophy--the
reason for which I will explain in a minute.

Jaspers' approach is the last and most noble philosophical theory
about philosophy that grows out of the most pure of all humanistic
and liberalistic thinking in Western Europe. Jaspers and Camus are
the only ones (along with Heidegger) who make an attempt to overcome
the nihilistic situation, but both fall back into the nihilistic
situation. They cannot find a way out because there is only the
way up--as long as they work within the framework of it, they must
fall back into it. Jaspers and Camus do not see that even the most
pure line of humanistic and liberal thought cannot get away from
the sorry situation.which leads us to ask: Must there not be in
fact something absolutely wrong in the very starting position of
that thinking, something that has always been in it--its opposite
which leads back into the nihilistic situation?

Jaspers says that basically philosophy cannot claim to be practical--though
he claims it to be so, but only so far as the inner experience of
man in his individual existence. He claims that by philosophizing
we can come into a state where, by purifying our thoughts and ourselves,
we can get sure of the fact that man has the possibility of transcendence
to God--the forever unknowable God. The individual can get the experience
that everything he finds out for truth can be rejected, but he must
transcend this. By proving his strength to go on he will find inner
assurance of his own transcendence. Inner experience (which is psychological
and mystical) can always lead to a certain proposition of mysticism
and with Jaspers it becomes the proposition that the individual
will get an inner feeling finally that he is really able to transcend
and that will give him assurance of his own worthiness against despair.
Out of inner subjective experience he wants to lead on to a way
that will give each one assurance against the nihilistic situation.

Now in science polemics is necessary, but not in philosophy. The
only criticism allowed in philosophy is to do it better. Every new
approach must take into account what has gone before. Jaspers' approach
I feel is valuable and valid in terms of education and self-education,
by which we can make single individuals to a certain degree bullet-proof
to the nihilistic approach. This is the positive reason why I chose
this book as a parallel study. Unfortunately, the conclusion is
that Jaspers cannot speak to man any more; he can only speak to
men or only to single human beings. he cannot possibly make any
approach which by finding out our common situation can help us to
overcome the nihilistic situation. This is why he feels that philosophy
is helpless and that philosophy cannot enforce itself. Old philosophy
wanted to gain power over the human mind--claiming to be the mediator
between God and man or between the meaning of the cosmos and man--but
it did not claim, as philosophy did later, to be the ruler of man.
As soon as the cosmological and theological approach broke down
(with Kant), philosophy had to find out what it really had to claim
for itself. This opened up the possibility of pure philosophy, which
we are pursuing here, but it also opened up the possibility for
the absolute claim to rule--which all 19th Century philosophers
made. Jaspers makes yet a third approach--we, as philosophers, can
give someone certain guidance but we cannot prove anything to him
or claim leadership--that is honorable in a negative way, growing
out of Kant (as opposed to Hegel and Nietzsche who claimed the absolute
leadership of man).

Jaspers' approach is one of the finest to show scientists that
they are really priests when they claim to be absolute experts;
that they want to rule the minds of men when they claim to have
the truth instead of searching for it. He shows that a philosopher
too much knows that truth is infinite and that he should never claim
to be in possession of it. But the weakness of Jaspers is that he
claims for a philosopher only the role of a man who guides individuals--the
philosopher must sit there waiting for the enlightened ones who
turn to philosophy, for the ones who have been faced with life problems
and have found science wanting in the answering of those problems.
His position is a noble one and in a way a Christian one in his
relation to goodness and God in order to show the way back to God
(not religion.) But I am very suspicious of all those positions
because the half-religious or religious thinker always puts goodness
first and truth second, God first and freedom second. Pure philosophical
thinkers are concerned the other way around--truth first goodness
second, freedom first God second--though you will find the reverse
is true in certain cases of philosophers and theologians. My position
is that we cannot know about God, so let's not aim for God. If we
come into a position in the search for truth where we can make an
approach to God visible, all right--but otherwise forget it.

And just as I am always a little critical of a philosopher concerned
with goodness because it means he places truth second, I am a little
bothered by Camus because he is concerned about the happiness of
man--which means that he is concerned with feelings first. A philosopher
is not entitled to that. When Nietzsche's sister wrote to him about
religion, he replied: "If you want to be elevated and feel
fine, go on that way. I am ready to take truth first----even if
it is the cruel and killing one." He made this decision in
order to make sure that into the search could not creep in the uncontrolled
human longing for feeling better. He would rather feel worse and
know that he had truth. As long as the concept of the whole human
personality held fast to provide a certain safeguard, that cruel
distinction as to truth and feeling was not so necessary (and in
a concept of freedom, which becomes possible with free philosophy,
we do not need such a distinction at all), but Nietzsche made his
stand when the splitting of the personality had already occurred.
All longing for goodness was already sentimental; all longing for
truth merciless because truth had become the search of the cold
human intellect. The heart had degraded into the cold human soul,
the mind into the intellect. Coldness of intellect is necessary
for science and scientists, but they do not have to believe it is
their mind. When Nietzsche took his stand against his sister, it
was in reality a stand for the intellect against the soul (sentimentality).

In physics there is a definition of dirt as matter in the wrong
place. But if we sweep that dirt together until we have a pile of
it and put it in the garden, when it rains we have top soil. Sentimentality
is feeling in the wrong place--displaced feeling not rightly employed--and
one proof of this is in the worst situation of displaced feeling
(and a situation very much prevailing): the function of self-pity,
which is displacement of the strength of human feelings into the
reverse. In a case of self-pity a man is mirrored and remirrored
on himself until finally he can feel sorry only for himself. That
man always wonders why no one feels for him but the answer is simple:
he feels so much for himself he has nothing left to give to others--his
feelings are all misplaced. It is not a question of morals and we
are not accusing such a person of being selfish (in fact it might
be better if he really were), but he has become an example of absolute
sentimentality and lives always in tears for himself. This misplacing,
or the possibility of it, has its roots in the split between the
human mind and the human heart which turned the mind into the intellect
and the heart into sentimentality which cannot be controlled any
more.

If we take the concept of freedom we see that pure philosophy puts
its interest in freedom first and in God second; then we see that
the concept of freedom is unable to show us even a possibility of
a cleavage between the mind and the heart. If someone is interested
in freedom, he is interested with his heart as well as with his
mind. Freedom is also a necessity for the human heart because it
makes us feel fine without our being able to distrust that feeling.
We have our own dignity (that is a feeling too) and the possibility
of self-respect--the possibility of self-respect as a feeling relating
to the human heart. But because it is such an essential feeling,
if we do have it, we take it for granted. We do not realize that
we have it--and we do the same with political freedom. In America,
for instance, we have taken freedom for granted for a long time.
We have forgotten that it is there and that it is something. We
have forgotten it as we forget air--until we come into a special
situation (if we are suddenly faced with the possibility of drowning,
for example) and realize that it is a fundamental need of life,
or as we suddenly and consciously experience the joy of breathing
in the mountains after months in a city. This is comparable to freedom
as a metaphysical experience, as a necessity of the mind as well
as of the heart. We see suddenly for the first time the whole functioning
of the human being in unity, in one. So I say that I care for freedom
first (Kant was the greatest and last one in the line) and this
divides me from Jaspers' approach.

Now to go ba ck for a moment to why I changed the title of this
course. The answer to the new title--"Why Must Everybody Study
Philosophy?" or "Why Must Every Human Being Philosophize?"--is
quite simple: he cannot avoid it. We have gotten into the habit
of calling every theory about something a philosophy (such as a
philosophy of gardening!), and it is a kind of muddle-headedness
which shows that a sense of philosophy is entirely lost. I had the
opportunity not so long ago to talk to a G. I. who had been in Germany
during the occupation, and he told me: "If there is one thing
I simply cannot stand to hear one more time, it's the word 'culture’!"
I also had a chance to talk with a German who told me: "There's
one thing I simply cannot stand to hear again --and that is the
word 'democracy' !" The American was right about the German
who always talks about culture because he is no longer creative.
The German was wrong about democracy because the Germans have an
entirely different concept of democracy, but he was right about
the use of the word. The word "philosophy" has had something
of the same fate--"Let's now take the philosophy of Mr. Taft
or Mr. Eisenhower." or "What is your philosophy?"--but
this is also in a way a very healthy thing. A dim awareness is shown
in these primitive people who talk that way that philosophy is something
that a human being leads his actions by. They have a feeling, in
all its primitiveness and even banality, for the deep fact that
free philosophy is really the activity by which human beings make
up their minds. We want now to try to go to the heart of this matter,
to find the creative thoughts that guide action, and to ask: How
is it possible that a human being can design certain plans in life,
see that they hold true, and then be able to make them truer by
changing them? What gives him this quality--the quality of philosophical
thinking--which leads to freedom as I define it?

Freedom is a rubber word; it has been stretched in every direction.
The moment in history when man really wanted to be absolutely free—the
French Revolution--and designed his own destiny, the real age of
revolutions set in. He fought under the flag of freedom and his
battles only earned him more slavery. Liberty and freedom mean about
the same to the English and American mind except for the use of
these two words in their plural form. The word 'liberties' is used
in a way that 'freedom' never is and the double-meaning of freedom
is just contained in this split. Preliminarily and paradoxically,
the fight for freedom that started at the beginning of our modern
age might have been lost just because it was always fought under
the flag of liberties and we have never gotten the flag of freedom
yet. Camus tries to put forward a theory that the real fault is
that we have always made revolutions rather than stopping at rebellion.
Unfortunately, this is not true. He tries to prove that the revolter
manifests the truth of the common dignity of man--but the revolter
is really a slave and creates a new master. What would be required
would be an absolute transformation of man’s situation in
the world.

Why must man work philosophically and live philosophically? That
can only be explained by the seeming rigidness of this proposition,
which almost brings in a categorical imperative. I condemn Nietzsche
and Hegel for bringing in the "you must" (instead of Kant's
"you shall") because it means if you do not, you will
be a dope. Yet, I too introduce a "you must." What do
I mean? I mean only the decision itself. I mean to make man aware
that his freedom consists in his being a metaphysical being—a
being who can decide. And just in this ability of decision lies
the secret of freedom. The first decision by which the power of
decision has to be manifested by every man is the decision for freedom
itself. When we were after a definition of freedom (even Kant in
the noble line which Jaspers closes), we still considered that we
were born free (as it was practically manifested in the American
Constitution): that is, freedom was given as a quality--and this
has been the foundation of the rights of man. Metaphysically speaking,
the fight between totalitarianism and what is good in the United
States is the fight between the rights of man and, on the other
side, the absolute denial of his qualities as man (not just his
rights, even his qualities). Unfortunately, this humanistic foundation
does not hold water now. The nihilistic situation has been able
to show that freedom is not given as a quality of man. Men have
not been born free any more than they have been born equal. Here
seems to be the danger--the danger that all American freedom has
come out of this and if it can be proved that it does not hold,
then we are all lost. One of the reasons why American propaganda
is ineffective and Russian propaganda is effective in Europe is
that every belief has vanished in Europe. This concept of being
born free is still based on a religious condition--just as the so-called
dignity of man stems from his being made by God. It is a remainder
of Christian thought, which philosophically can no longer hold water
since religion has lost its central position and we no longer believe
these things are given by God. This does not mean that America is
politically endangered from this yet, but metaphysically speaking,
we must ask: If we do not believe that men are born free, how can
they be free?

We have now to find the proof of human freedom in human creativeness
itself and since religion has been blown out of the center of the
creative activities of human beings, we must show first that the
human being is a metaphysical being without the help of religious
transcendence. We will take only the fact of the life activity of
man himself into consideration--and in his life activity man shows
the possibility of a creativity to bring things into the world that
have not been there before. If man is creative with the possibility
of decision--to go one step deeper and one step back--we find that
we come back once again to the position of the Enlightemuent. Man
has been born as a metaphysical being who has the possibility to
make himself free; he has been given a creativeness that can help
him to make himself free, to create freedom, to make it—which
means the first decision that man has to make is for freedom itself.
So I introduced a “must”: man must make a decision for
freedom if he wants to develop himself in freedom, if he wants to
live in freedom; and having made that decision, then he must study
philosophy because philosophy cares most for freedom and the development
of it. Philosophy studies freedom because freedom is the central
source of human life itself (as distinguished from existence)--life
can only be created in freedom.

And this, of course, brings us to the question of truth and to
what its methods might be. By this very example of my own procedure--that
the nihilistic arguments against the rights of man are valid--I
have tried to find more truth, and we find here something characteristic
for philosophy: all human truth is to be found in the same spot.
In philosophy truth is always located in the same place. If we want
to go deeper into the rights of man, we take up the same question
again. Let us assume that truth is the source of life, then the
eternal procedure of man can be compared to a well-digger who comes
again and again to the same spot. The source got dirtied and dried
up after the Enlightenment, but if we go back to the same spot and
go deeper, the water will spring up again for awhile, then become
dirtied, to be found again by once more going deeper. The procedure
of philosophy--of all the procedures we have to design to make human
life and the world more meaningful--is the very procedure of human
life itself.